One ingredient of an environment, therefore, is the operating system. But operating systems include a number of different parameters. For example, many operating systems allow you to choose your command prompt or a default command path. All these parameters taken together constitute the environment.

(2) In DOSsystems, the environment is an area in memory that the operating system and other programs use to store various types of miscellaneous information. For example, your word processor may use the environment area to store the location of backupfiles. You can view or modify the environment with the SET command.